Santa Muerte high-control templos (umbrella)

Santa Muerte (the Holy Death) is one of the fastest-growing folk-religious phenomena in the Americas — an estimated 10–12 million primarily Mexican and Mexican-American devotees venerating a personified-Death female figure rooted in Spanish-colonial Catholic syncretism with pre-Columbian death iconography. The mainstream phenomenon is low-control, often homely altars maintained alongside ordinary Catholic practice. This entry covers the smaller documented high-control templos (most prominently around Doña Queta's Tepito altar's broader penumbra and several rival templo lineages around Tultitlán, the Iglesia Católica Tradicional Mex-USA of David Romo, and various smaller cults in Sinaloa, Michoacán and the US Southwest). These specific lineages have been documented (R. Andrew Chesnut, 'Devoted to Death: Santa Muerte, the Skeleton Saint', Oxford 2017, 2nd ed.; multiple Reuters and AP investigations) to involve transactional coercive-magic obligations (escalating votive fees, blood-offering pressure, severance from family who refuse to convert), and in specific cases adjacency to organised criminal networks — the cartel groups Familia Michoacana, La Línea and Knights Templar have variously claimed Santa Muerte patronage in ways that pull peripheral devotees into associated violence. Vatican statements (Cardinal Ravasi, 2013) and the Mexican Bishops' Conference have repeatedly distinguished mainstream Catholic devotion from the high-control Santa Muerte cults. The entry is necessarily an umbrella because of the decentralised templo-by-templo structure.